Thursday, January 07, 2016

10 things BLENDED LEARNING is NOT

What has
‘Blended Learning’ done for the world of learning? It had the promise to shake
us out of the ‘classroom/lecture-obsessed’ straightjacket into a fully developed, new
paradigm, where online, social, informal and many other forms of learning could
be considered and implemented. This needed an analytic approach to developing
and designing blended learning solutions. So what happened?

Blended
learning was really just the learning world coping with the onslaught of new
ways of teaching and learning. It's an adaptive response to what's happening to
the learning world as the real world changes around it. By real world I
mean changes in attitudes, learner expectations, demographics, politics, but
above all massive and rapid change in technology. Blended learning as a concept
allowed the system to absorb all of this at a sensible pace, as it was a useful
bridge between the new and the old. However, seeing it as some sort of bandage or compromise simply disabled the idea, as it led not to fresh thinking but a defense of old with a few new, adjunct ideas added on.

It also got muddled by metaphor. Blended learning started to fail when it got bogged
down by banal metaphors. I've heard them all - blended cocktails, meals, even
alloys. Within the ‘food metaphor’ we got courses, recipes, buffet learning,
tapas learning, fast food versus gourmet. The problem with metaphor-driven
blended learning is that who's to say that your metaphor is any better than
mine? I’ve even seen the 'fruit blender' metaphor, trying to explain the
concept in terms of a fruit smoothie! Let me put forward my own food metaphor.
What do you get when you blend things in a metaphoric mixer, without due care
and attention to needs, taste and palette? Blended baloney. That is often what
we get with models as metaphors - dull, tasteless sausage meat. Blended
LEARNING is not a metaphor.

Dozens of
definitions of blended learning then floated around, most of them muddle-headed
as they were simple delivery dualisms:

Blend of
classroom and e-learning

Blend of
face-to-face and e-learning

This
‘velcro’ approach to blended learning simply fixed the old classroom paradigm
and added an online dimension. It was an attempt to simply use the definition
to carry on doing what you did before with some extras. The problem with a
definition that fixes a delivery mechanism in advance of the blended design
e.g. classroom or ‘f2f’ is that you’ve already given up on rational design.

5. Broad dualisms

A slightly
better approach was to broadly define the world of learning into two inclusive
categories:

Blend of
online and offline

Blend of
synchronous and asynchronous

Blend of
formal and informal

The problem
with these definitions is that they are looser but still wide components that
may not be needed in an optimal blend. These definitions are simply too
general, in that they simply divide the universe into two sets. However, the
real issue with all of these definitions is that they are really definitions of
blended INSTRUCTION not blended learning. We need to look at the concept from a
broader learning perspective with definitions that rise above ‘instruction’ to
concepts that encompass context:

6. Flipped classroom

This is
just one species of blended learning and a rather simplistic version. Again,
however, the focus is on blended ‘teaching’ not ‘learning’. It’s yet another
fixed dualistic formula. The concept is primarily about switching the focus of
teaching away from exposition towards more Socratic f2f methods. It served a
purpose in proposing a radical rethink but still fits the old
lecture/classroom/f2f v online dualistic mindset.

7. 70:20:10

This is a more sophisticated version of blended learning in that it
emerges from theory and studies that show how people actually learn in
practice, as opposed of supply type models of teaching. Around 70% of learning
comes from experience, experiment and reflection, 20% from working with others
and 10% from planned learning solutions and reading. It’s common in
organizational learning, it proposes and explained in superb detail in 702010 towards 100% performance by
Arets, Jennings and Heijnen. Now we’re getting there but again these
percentages apply more to workplace learning and not education. It’s a great
shift away from traditional, flawed mindsets about how people learning but
needs further work to be useful across the entire learning landscape. Blended learning has certainly taken
root but it has no define shape, theory, methodology or best practice. You can
call anything a blended solution

8. Sophisticated

All of the above are either metaphors, simplistic dualisms, or subsets of
blended learning. Don't mistake the phrase for an anlaytic theory. It is os often used as a platitude. It is an old mindset that smothers the idea before it has had
the chance to breath. What happened to analysis? Blended learning abandoned careful thought and
analysis, the consideration of the very many methods of learning delivery,
sensitivity to context and culture and a matching to resources and budget. It
also needs to include scalability, updatability and several other variables.
What it led to were primitive, dualistic 'classroom and e-learning' mixes. It
never got beyond vague 'velcro' models, where bits and bobs were stuck together
(now that's a metaphor). You need to work towards an 'optimal' blend. 9. AnalyticTruly analytic blended learning is not a back of an envelope exercise. It needs a careful analytic process, where the learners, type of learning, organisational culture and available resources need to be matched with the methods of delivery. It has INPUTS, decision making and OUTPUTS. Until we see 'Blended learning' as a sophisticated analytic process for determining optimal blends, we'll be stuck in this vague, qualitative world, where the phrase is just an excuse for old practices.

10. ’Veil of ignorance’

In
practice, to do blended learning, one has to apply what called the ’veil of
ignorance’, an idea that goes back to Kant, Locke, Rousseau and more recently
John Rawls. You have to go through a thought experiment and imagine your course,
workshop, whatever, as having NO pre-set components. Now do some detailed
analysis on what type of outcome you want from this in terms of your ‘learning’. Only then,
having rid yourself of personal preconceptions and institutional forms of
delivery, can you really start to rebuild your course/learning experience. So you start with an analysis
of the learning and learners, then take into consideration your resources
envelope, with a full cost analysis. Also include long-term sustainability
issues such as updatability and maintenance. To construct a blended learning
experience you have to deconstruct your natural bias to do what you or your
institution have always done and reconstruct the learning experience from
scratch.